Now out from Otoliths—A SCRIPT, Joel Chace's new chapbook

"Joel Chace’s reading at Robins Books May 19 makes me want to look at his linebreaks again," wrote Ron Silliman in a footnote to a recent post to his blog. This new chapbook provides the perfect opportunity.



A SCRIPT
Joel Chace
24 pages
Cover photo by Michael Aanji Crowley
Otoliths 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9806025-3-1
$8.25 + p&h
Direct URL: http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/a-script/7226173

Joel Chace's A Script cons our part: part Asbergian stutter, part zen enlightenment, words and white spaces carefully/ randomly placed pace us through a spectrum of verbal light, asking if there is a difference between self and other, background and text. These experiments of space and the phrase and word range over nature, food, and communi-cation, invoking Inca and Silliman both, "speaking that other language again ... yield itself each sentence." —Larissa Shmailo

I like what Joel Chace does with the topology of the line, the way he shows how far it can be stretched while still maintaining its integrity. And I like how in doing so he takes the plainest words—especially everyday nouns like work, linen, world, office, desk, ceiling—and makes them oddly visible in the poem's raking light:
"words         /                 tiny           far
         but clear" indeed. —Barry Schwabsky